Announcing Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4 on Snowflake Cortex AI
We are thrilled to announce the availability of Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4, the next generation of Anthropic’s Claude models available to customers on Snowflake Cortex AI. This is the latest development out of Anthropic and Snowflake’s multiyear partnership, to help enterprises develop and scale easy, efficient and trusted AI products.
As a launch partner with Anthropic, we're providing same-day availability of Claude Sonnet 4 (general availability) and Claude Opus 4 (in preview on Cortex AI). Both models are available within the secure Snowflake perimeter for use with Cortex LLM functions and Cortex REST APIs, and will be coming soon in Cortex Analyst and Snowflake Intelligence.
Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4 set new standards for coding, advanced reasoning and AI agents, per Anthropic. Claude Opus 4 is the world’s best coding model, with sustained performance on complex, long-running tasks and agent workflows. Claude Sonnet 4 is a drop-in replacement for Claude Sonnet 3.7, delivering superior coding and reasoning while responding more precisely to your instructions. Users can select between the two models to optimize accuracy, speed and cost for their specific use case.
Snowflake Cortex AI
Cortex AI is a suite of integrated features and services that include fully managed LLM inference and easy retrieval of data, so that customers can quickly analyze unstructured data alongside their structured data and expedite the building of agentic AI applications. Cortex’s unified AI and data platform helps organizations turn AI concepts into reality in days. Enterprises of all sizes and industries can now implement a range of use cases from text summarization and sentiment analysis to the development of powerful AI agents.
Claude Opus 4
Advanced agentic capabilities: Claude Opus 4 is specifically designed for long-horizon tasks and complex problem-solving, unlocking new use cases that require sustained reasoning, per Anthropic. It can also connect across multiple data sources in an enterprise to synthesize comprehensive insights. For example, customers can use Opus 4-powered agents to analyze sales transactions, CRM notes and support tickets to reason through why opportunities were lost, such as recurring product issues or slow follow-ups.
Improvements in context management and coding: Claude Opus 4 improves on context management with memory capabilities that allow it to effectively summarize and reference previous interactions. When given access to local files, the model is particularly effective for tasks requiring context retention across multiple turns or sessions, according to Anthropic. For advanced coding, the model can independently plan and execute complex development tasks end-to-end. Developers can assign projects like refactoring a legacy codebase, building a full-stack application from specifications, or implementing a CI/CD pipeline.
Claude Sonnet 4
Claude Sonnet 4 helps optimize for the right performance, cost and latency. The model can be used to enable production-ready AI assistants for situations where both intelligence and speed are crucial. According to Anthropic, Sonnet 4 excels at efficient research, performing rapid analysis across diverse data sources for quick business intelligence, competitive analysis and real-time decision support. It can also be used for large-scale content generation and analysis with enhanced quality, ideal for crafting customer communications, analyzing feedback and producing marketing materials while maintaining optimal throughput.
Additional model capabilities
In addition to the capabilities highlighted above, Claude Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 offer a few enhancements, per Anthropic:
Extended thinking with tool use, to switch between reasoning and tool use and enabling agentic applications to deliver more thoughtful and accurate responses.
Improved steerability, enabling them to handle complex and lengthy system prompts with greater ease to get more precise and reliable results.
- Advanced organizational knowledge and agentic search, allowing them to process vast amounts of information and interact with numerous data sources for sophisticated knowledge work.
Using Anthropic models on Cortex AI
With Cortex AI, accessing LLMs is easy. You don’t have to manage integrations, and governance is consistent across data and AI. You can simply access Anthropic models in one of the supported regions. In non-supported regions, you can access them with cross-region inference enabled.
SQL and Python
The model can be integrated into a data pipeline or a Streamlit in Snowflake app to process multiple rows in a table. The COMPLETE function, accessible in both SQL and Python, can be used for this integration. You can also access Claude models from a Snowflake Notebook or your IDE of choice using OAuth for custom clients.
SELECT SNOWFLAKE.CORTEX.COMPLETE('claude-4-sonnet', 'Summarize the key benefits of data warehousing with Snowflake in three bullet points.');
SELECT SNOWFLAKE.CORTEX.COMPLETE('claude-4-opus', 'Build me a Streamlit App that will visualize my data.');REST API
To make low-latency inference calls to Cortex AI from services or applications outside Snowflake, simply use the REST API interface. Here is an example of what that looks like:
curl -X POST \
-H "Authorization: Bearer <snowflake_token>" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-H "Accept: application/json" \
-d '{
"model": "claude-4-sonnet",
"messages": [
{
"role": "user",
"content": "Summarize this customer feedback in bullet points: <feedback>"
}
],
"top_p": 0,
"temperature": 0
}' \
https://<account_identifier>.snowflakecomputing.com/api/v2/cortex/inference:completeUnified access to frontier models with Cortex AI
Cortex AI empowers you to leverage the unique strengths of diverse LLMs for optimal accuracy, performance and latency across a variety of tasks like coding, reasoning, extraction and conversation. By integrating industry-leading LLMs, including Anthropic's latest models, Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4, into one secure platform, Cortex AI simplifies integration and helps ensure consistent governance. This unified environment helps your teams build flexible, scalable and production-ready AI agents and applications with confidence.
Looking ahead
Snowflake prioritizes security and privacy, and Anthropic is dedicated to building secure, reliable AI — creating strong alignment in delivering cutting-edge innovations. Both Claude Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 are now available within the secure Snowflake perimeter for use with Cortex LLM Functions and REST API, and will be coming soon for Cortex Agents, Cortex Analyst and Snowflake Intelligence.
Learn more
Get started with Cortex AI and Claude 4 using this Quickstart Guide.
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